28.01.2013 (Monday). All the night (and still in the morning), the
ship is steaming towards the Eastern side of Joinville Island. I do not sleep
well: all the night, we are hearing the shock of iceflows against the hull of
the ship. Sometimes these shocks makes the ship really shaking. I wake up with
a cloudy weather.There is a bit of snow falling down, which turns later on into
a slight drizzle. We are deep into the ice. Except for rare polynias (i.e.
pools of open water into the ice), everything is white: the white of the sky
merges into the white of the ice. No special duty this morning, so I can rest a
little bit; the last two days we did not had a second to rest; I think that
Marie is still sleeping; my colleague of cabin definitely does. Claude De
Broyer (now retired) of our institute uses to say that on the Polartsern you
live at 200 km/h. His metaphor very adequately describes the situation we are
living. Writing this journal helps me to keep the notion of the running time.
Otherwise I would no longer know if we are Monday or Tuesday...), as we are
working 7 days per week. From the bridge, I see a group of about ten pinguins,
fleeing the approach of the ship, in a comic and somewhat clumsy danse. True
little avian clowns! Unfortunately I did not had my camera at hand at the right
moment. During the whole day, we see a lot of so-called crab-eater seals
gliding on the ice. I have no idea about the origin of their strange name. As
said already said on another page of this blog there are no crabs in
Antarctica. Sometimes we see overturned iceflows. Their underside is brownish
due to the occurence of microscopic sea algae (ice diatoms). A significant part
of the Antarctic marine food web depends on them.
Due to the ice condition, which does not improve, the trawling and
dredging operations planned east off Joinville Island have to be cancelled in
the afternoon. Only scientists working with gears operated vertically (boxcores
and multicorers) are able to work today. Tomorrow the planktonologists will
start their ten days krill survey, which does not concern us (or only very
marginally), which means that we will have little field scientific work to do
for a while.
I am informed that several people on board have a kind of flu. I
know from first hand how it can be an unpleasant experience. Six years ago, I
got a terrible flu on the Polarstern and was sick for more than one week. This
time I was vaccinated to prevent this problem.
The white of the ice merges into the white of the sky.
The inappropriately called crab-eater seals.
Ice chaos.
The stripe of brown ice got its colour from microscopical diatom algae. These ice algae plays an important role in the Antarctic foodweb.
(Cédric)
28.01.2013 (Monday)
After lunch, I go outside.
Everything’s white ! We are surrounded by ice and the sky is foggy so we cannot
see the horizon’s line. My eyes are closing because of all that bright white
everywhere. The boat stopped, so everything is still and very quiet. It’s a
very relaxing atmosphere. Later on, I see some crabeater seals resting on the
ice through the window of my cabin and some penguins swimming away from the
boat! The AGT and RD of today are cancelled because of the ice. We are informed
later that the krill survey is planned for the next ten days, so it will be
very quiet for the benthos people. We will sort out in more details what we
already catched and prepare the very intensive work waiting for us after those
ten calmer days.
(Marie)
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